The present invention relates to information retrieval, particularly the retrieval of a portion of an information record and/or the insertion of that portion into a digital destination such as a file or field.
Digital storage of information has tremendous advantages. Text may be stored, categorized and easily searched. The digital environment also offers the opportunity to store not only text, but multimedia files such as sound, graphics and video. Enormous amounts of information may be stored in a relatively small physical space.
There remains, however biases toward absorbing information through reading off of a printed page. Office workers often print out documents otherwise available on their computer. Students can be found in libraries carrying their laptop computers and yet reading from printed books. Nevertheless, highlighted or marked up collections of books and papers can be unduly cumbersome given the availability of computers. It is desirable to be able to more easily maintain an abridged electronic archive of knowledge gleaned from information records such as books, papers and electronic sources such as the Internet.
Methods for retrieving text and storing it into an electronic system are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,616,038 (Olschafskie et al.), the full disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein. This prior patent describes using an optical scanner on a printed book that has a corresponding digital version. Excerpts can be retrieved accurately because they are already available in digital form. It is only necessary to identify the portions to be retrieved for storage or later access. It is desirable to improve the efficiency of such retrieval and storage.